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Antibiotic Resistance: Need for Global Solutions

18 November 2013

GLOBAL - A global view - both geographically and professionally as it covers both medical and veterinary applications - of antibiotic resistance, its causes and effects by The Lancet Infectious Diseases Commission.

The causes of antibiotic resistance are complex and include human behaviour at many levels of society, according to a report from The Lancet Infectious Diseases Commission, an international team. The consequences affect everybody in the world, they say, adding that similarities with climate change are evident.

Many efforts have been made to describe the many different facets of antibiotic resistance and the interventions needed to meet the challenge. However, coordinated action is largely absent, especially at the political level, both nationally and internationally.

Antibiotics paved the way for unprecedented medical and societal developments, and are today indispensible in all health systems. Achievements in modern medicine, such as major surgery, organ transplantation, treatment of preterm babies, and cancer chemotherapy, which we today take for granted, would not be possible without access to effective treatment for bacterial infections.

Within just a few years, we might be faced with dire setbacks, medically, socially and economically, unless real and unprecedented global coordinated actions are immediately taken.

In this paper, the authors describe the global situation of antibiotic resistance, its major causes and consequences, and identify key areas in which action is urgently needed.

It is divided into nine parts:

Global epidemiology of antibiotic resistance and use

Getting out of the impasse

Minimising the time to effective treatment: rapid diagnostic testing

The interface between people and animals

Antibiotic use in animals

Use for growth promotion

Veterinary use

Complex pathways

Evidence of spread

The effect

Time to move on from blame and shame

The access and excess dilemma

Challenges of antibiotic resistance in weak health systems

Improving the interface between academics and the pharmaceutical industry